I never looked into it, until now I haven't specifically bought a USB hub. But recently I've been using the USB hub that's built into my monitor, but it powers off when the monitor does, so I decided to add some dedicated USB hubs. After doing some research, I came across the designation “Multi-TT”, which seems to be the thing to get.

The difference, as I understand it, is basically like the difference between a network hub and a switch (though I'm sure that stretches the analogy). They do push the price up from $10 to $30, but that was within my price range.

The trick is that this feature is either not well advertised or something. Where I bought it there was only one USB hub listing “multi-tt” when I searched. I've been using them for a couple of days (I got 2, partly to have more bandwidth if I hook up multiple devices, mostly to have ports for more than one device (my laptop, at one point I had my game box by the computer)…